Atonement(64)
Afterwards, we walked around and found a local Franprix where we bought lunch and enjoyed it at a park surrounding a lake with a gorgeous view of the back of Versailles Palace. Colin laid out a blanket he’d grabbed from the apartment and stuffed in the lightweight backpack he’d decided to carry.
I handed him the fresh baguette we’d bought and he opened a package of ham, cheese and pâté he’d bought in Franprix. With a real knife, we were able to make our sandwiches from the fresh baguette any way we liked. I settled on a pâté and Brie cheese sandwich while Colin had ham and cheese from the Comté region of France.
We shared a bottle of red wine from the Burgundy region and people watched while we ate our food in silence. It was a comfortable silence we’d developed over the weeks of traveling. Neither one of us felt the need to talk all the time and it a was an overwhelming feeling of familiarity that we could eat side by side in silence, enjoy a bottle of wine and watch the world go by.
It was how I’d always imagined my life to be. I considered myself a fairly low drama human being which is one of the reasons why my cousin, Aubrey, drove me nuts. Her life seemed to be a running episode of the Jerry Springer Show that refused to quit and I hated all the of issues she constantly brought into my life. With Colin, I felt nothing but peace and absolute satisfaction in what we had and it suited me he was as low maintenance and low drama as I was.
“Listen, remember last night when we were talking and I told you I was too good to be true?” Colin finally wondered out loud.
I was on my second glass of wine and eating slices of Comté cheese as I adjusted my position so we could look at one another with out me turning my head. “Yeah. So what?”
“Well, I meant it, Deirdre. I know you think I am a gentleman and I respect you for that but I have a lot to atone for and I don’t know if I tell you everything about me if you’d look at me the way you are looking at me now and that is what scares me.”
“How am I looking at you now?”
“You’re gazing at me with those gorgeous hazel-green eyes of yours and they absolutely glow with happiness. I would have never thought I would be able to inspire such light in your eyes and sometimes, I think I can keep all my secrets to myself and we would be just fine. I don’t ever want you to look at me any different.”
My smile slightly faded and I chewed the cheese in my mouth down to paste before I swallowed and washed the remnants down with wine. “Colin, you’re starting to scare me. What are you trying to say?”
He looked away from my face and stared at the lake. “Liam and I did something so deplorable…we should both burn in Hell. Granted, I am not a huge believer in The Man upstairs—if you know what I mean—but…we should have known better and it was so stupid. Why do we do such foolish things as human beings yet at the time, it seems like a good idea?”
“Depends on what you did,” I replied before I finished my wine and set the plastic cup down. “We all do foolish things, Colin. It’s called growing up and learning, becoming an adult, rebelling, testing our limits and trying to find out what we can get away with and what we can’t. Sometimes, when we do something crazy like drink and drive and we get home safely, we thank our lucky stars we weren’t stopped by the police or better yet, we aren’t sitting in a jail cell at that moment. We managed to get home safe. I’m sure the feeling would be completely different if you ran someone over…you know, like what happened with my dad, and drove away.”
I pulled my sweater coat closer to my body as the wind had picked up. “I don’t know. Maybe the person who did that felt big and bad too because they got away with something and they were never caught. The file’s been closed and it goes down as an unsolved homicide. The police did all they could but there wasn’t enough evidence left at the scene. It was as if…perhaps the people involved didn’t realize they’d run over a person. There weren’t any tire tracks or indications they tried to slow down or stop. The detectives involved in the case at Seattle PD said it was one of the weirdest cases they’d ever been involved with and they couldn’t understand how there wasn’t evidence of the make and model…”
“Have you ever tried Bath Salts?” Colin inquired after an interminable silence.
“What do you mean? The drug? God no…drugs aren’t something I do. I have had my fair share of marijuana and nicotine over the years but hard drugs and doing well in an Ivy League don’t exactly go hand-in-hand. Then again, you already know that so I’m not telling you anything new.”